Inside: Hermès
Some houses define luxury by accumulation — more collections, more collaborations, more noise. Hermès has spent a century doing the opposite.
That makes it one of the more interesting houses to examine. In an industry that moves fast and talks loudly, Hermès operates on different terms — slower, quieter, and with a consistency of vision that most brands would struggle to sustain across a single decade, let alone six. The craft is real. The thinking behind it is serious. And the results, when you look closely, are worth the attention.
Currant is examining the great luxury houses this year — their collections, their launches, their creative vision, and the ideas shaping what they are becoming. And Hermès is, of course, one of them.
This page will follow: the objects, the fragrances, the design codes, and the moments that reveal what the house is thinking and where it is going.
mar 18
spring/summer 2026
A Moment By The Sea with
Un Jardin sous la Mer
Aquatic perfumery has a reputation problem. The genre that once felt fresh — ozonic, cool, vaguely oceanic — has spent the better part of three decades producing fragrances that smell less like water and more like the idea of water as imagined by someone who has never left the city. Clean. Inoffensive. Immediately forgettable.
Christine Nagel is not interested in that tradition. Un Jardin sous la Mer, the newest chapter in Hermès's Jardins collection, takes the sea as its starting point and then largely abandons the obvious. There is no brine here, no crash of waves, none of the aquatic shorthand that has come to define the genre. Instead, Nagel proposes something stranger and more composed: a garden that exists beneath the surface, where light behaves differently and the usual rules of landscape no longer apply.
Mineral notes meet the creamy brightness of tiare flower and the warm, nut-like depth of tamanu — materials that together produce something genuinely difficult to place. It is not marine. It is not floral. It occupies the space between, evoking depth and luminosity rather than any specific ingredient. It smells, somehow, like the idea of blue.
What makes Un Jardin sous la Mer worth paying attention to is not that it smells like the sea. It is that it smells like something the sea makes you feel — and that is a considerably harder thing to achieve.
Notes
Currant Essays
Currant Essays is the magazine’s long-form editorial writing. These essays interpret cultural moments and shifts shaping modern life, culture, and style, offering considered readings of the present grounded in context, observation, and reflection.
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